Thunar is a new modern file manager for the Xfce Desktop Environment. Thunar has been designed from the ground up to be fast and easy-to-use. Its user interface is clean and intuitive, and does not include any confusing or useless options by default. Thunar is fast and responsive with a good start up time and folder load time.

Automounting

Plugins and addons

Thunar Archive Plugin — Plugin which allows you to create and extract archive files using contextual menu items. It does not create or extract archives directly, but instead acts as a frontend for other programs such as File Roller (file-roller), Ark (kdeutils-ark) or Xarchiver (xarchiver). Part of xfce4-goodies.

Thunar Media Tags Plugin — Plugin which allows you to view detailed information about media files. It also has a bulk renamed and allows editing of media tags. It supports ID3 (the MP3 file format's system) and Ogg/Vorbis tags. Part of xfce4-goodies.

Thunar Volume Manager

While Thunar can support automatic mounting and unmounting of removable media, the Thunar Volume Manager allows extended functionality, such as automatically running commands or automatically opening a Thunar window for mounted media.

Installation

Thunar Volume Manager can be installed from the package thunar-volman in the official repositories.

Configuration

It can also be configured to execute certain actions when cameras and audio players are connected.
After installing the plugin:

Launch Thunar and go to Edit > Preferences

Under the 'Advanced' tab, check 'Enable Volume Management'

Click configure and check the following items:

Mount removable drives when hot-plugged.

Mount removable media when inserted.

Also make desired changes (see the example below)

Here's an example setting for making Amarok play an audio CD.

Multimedia - Audio CDs: amarok --cdplay %d

Tips and tricks

Automounting of large external drives

If Thunar refuses to mount large removable media (size > 1TB) although thunar-volman and gvfs has been installed, then try installing a different automounter such as udevil/devmon.

Using Thunar to browse remote locations

Since Xfce 4.8 (Thunar 1.2) it is possible to browse remote locations (such as FTP servers or Samba shares) directly in Thunar. To enable this functionality ensure that gvfs, gvfs-smb and sshfs packages are installed. A 'Network' entry is visible in Thunar's side bar and remote locations can be opened by using the following URI schemes in the location dialog (opened with Ctrl+l): smb://, ftp://, ssh://, sftp:// & followed by the server hostname or IP address.

There is no URI scheme for NFS shares, but Thunar can issue a mount command if you setup your fstab properly.

What's important here is the noauto which prevents the share from being mounted until you click on it, user which allows any user to mount (an unmount) the share, _netdev which makes network connectivity a pre-requisite, and finally bg which puts the mounting operation the background so if your server requires some spin-up time you won't have to deal with time out messages and re-clicking until it works.

Note: If you want to permanently store passphrases of remote filesystem locations, you have to install gnome-keyring.

Starting in daemon mode

Thunar may be run in daemon mode. This has several advantages, including a faster startup for Thunar, as well as Thunar running in the background and only opening a window when necessary (for instance, when a flash drive is inserted).

Make sure the command thunar --daemon is autostarted on login. See Xfce and Autostarting for more details.

Solving problem with slow cold start

Some people still have problems with Thunar taking a long time to start for the first time. This is due to gvfs checking the network, preventing Thunar from starting until gvfs finishes its operations. To change this behaviour, edit /usr/share/gvfs/mounts/network.mount and change AutoMount=true to AutoMount=false.

Hide Shortcuts in Side Pane

There is a hidden menu to hide Shortcuts in the Side Pane.

Right click in the Side Pane where there are no shortcuts, like on the DEVICES section label. Then you will get a pop-up menu where you can uncheck items you do not want displayed.

Custom actions

This section covers useful custom actions which can be accessed through Edit -> Configure custom actions and which are stored in ~/.config/Thunar/uca.xml. More examples are listed in the thunar wiki. Furthermore this blog post provides a comprehensive collection of custom actions.

Scan for viruses

Link to Dropbox

Name

Command

File patterns

Appears if selection contains

Link to Dropbox

ln -s %f /path/to/DropboxFolder

*

Directories, other files

Please note that when using many custom actions to symlink files and folder to a particular place, it might be useful to put them into the Send To folder of the context menu to avoid that the menu itself gets bloated. This is fairly easy to achieve and requires a .desktop file in ~/.local/share/Thunar/sendto for each action to perform. Say we want to put the above dropbox symlink action into Send To, we create a dropbox_folder.desktop with the following content. The new applied action will be active after restarting Thunar.